My Brush with The Big Money

Start Up Nation for Thee, Minimum Wage for Me

It was a physical nexus.

When I had to leave agriculture (a story for another time) I did not have the luxury of sitting around. Though I paid the same as anyone else in Israel for Social Security, unemployment payments were for salaried workers only, not for sole proprietors. I had to land on my feet running. And run and hustle I did, after almost twenty years in Israel I found myself shucking from business to business with a carton of items for sale under my arm. It was my forage into the world of direct marketing, and I mean direct, face to face marketing, where I would disturb someone during their workday and convince them that they really needed the five-dollar desk calculator that I was hawking, and that they might as well buy a few for their kids while they were at it. To succeed at it, as any salesman will tell you, you must internalize as soon as possible the great mantra of salesmanship: This next one is a sale. Your dry spell, no matter how long, is going to end the minute you walk into the next door, where you are going to sell your whole box. You cannot accept defeat because you will not have food for your family. As morning passes into early afternoon, a cloud gathers over your head, the box becomes unbearably heavy and unwieldy, and as early afternoon passes into early evening, the cloud gets darker and the box is falling apart and you are sweaty, and it all shows on your face. The same face that needs to convince the next person that you meet to buy a calculator. It is then, at your very lowest point, that you must zap the clouds with the sunshine of your confidence, instill in your arms the strength of Samson, and bear a countenance on your face that draws all, near and far, into your sphere of influence wherein you will allow them to become partners in the deal of the century. Five dollars apiece, with a receipt. Get one while they last.

It is a timeless skill, and there is satisfaction in becoming proficient at it, knowing that if I were to be thrown back a century and a half to Utah, I could be selling Dr. Ehud’s Special Liniment for all Ailments to wagon trains heading west or if thrown ahead in time to a settlement on Mars I could be selling Earth Bar chocolates. This basic capitalism is a huge economic engine that has lifted myriads out of poverty. The problems start when the product being sold is of dubious value. Using the previous example, if I know that half of the calculators that I am selling will stop functioning after a week, I need to “spin” my pitch to convince someone to buy the product. Tainted sales such as these instill distrust in the marketplace. The ups and downs of capitalist reality. During the year and a half that I was inv

olved with this, I entered every place of small business from the southern part of Ashdod to Beer-Sheva and beyond, many times. We always had decent cheap products and customers would look forward to seeing us. It was pleasant for both parties to the transaction.

After I had become proficient as a salesman, I found myself looking at the computer set-ups in these small businesses. My brother-in-law and myself were early geeks. My first computer was an IBM PC with two five-inch floppy disk drives. We advanced from there, autodidacts like millions of others around the globe. I was an early Lotus 123 and dBase maven (if you understand you understand). I liked seeing the business solutions. This was a time of an actual revolution, where small businesses could computerize. One of the biggest problems in Israel was Hebrew language support. For a small business to computerize, it had to use off-the-shelf software (like those mentioned above). Hebrew support had to be developed as an add-on for each specific program by local Israeli developers. Over time I gained a good understanding of the status of small business computing at that time.

Before I knew it, I was talking with a small business owner who needed a database solution. They were trying to manage their data in a word processing program. It worked well enough when they had fifty or so records. When I spoke with them, they had four hundred records. Perfect for a lotus 123 solution. I had it ready for them within days, for use on a single computer, with an idiot-proof input interface. They were ecstatic. They paid well and I began to imagine myself making a living doing this. The problem was that they became successful very quickly and told me that my solution was not working anymore. I understood what had happened. They had outgrown the limits of Lotus 123, which was good for a couple of thousand records. I knew the standard solution, which was to use connected sheets, but even as I worked on it for them, I knew that they would be disappointed with the performance as that was the main drawback to connected sheets.

Then Microsoft saved the day. In an unexpected and overwhelming move, Microsoft brought to Israel their Office suite will full Hebrew support. Israel is a small market, and it was a huge compliment for Microsoft to just include Hebrew on their list of supported languages. The interesting thing was that this support was on the operating system level. This was Windows for Workplace 3.11. With this operating system, a simple network card, and a coil of thick black coaxial cable, any business, no matter how small, could be networked. Everyone in the office could have their own access to company files and data.

More importantly, included in this version of Office (4.2 I believe) was a program called Microsoft Access. It is hard to explain the impact of this program. It was a desktop relational database. That means that it had tables of information that had relationships with each other. For example, one table could be customer contact information, while another could be customer orders. They would be connected so that when viewing a customer, the orders connected with that customer could be called up. This all was not new. What was new was that Access included a non-programming, visual developer environment that allowed the layperson to build what-you-see-is-what-you-get input forms and data queries and reports. In other words, a custom program suited to the business at hand. No less important, Microsoft distributed this software with beautifully written user manuals. They were works of art. If you read the manuals cover to cover, while using the programs, you knew the programs.

The manual for Access was huge, over four hundred pages I think, and I worked through it page by page. I knew exactly what I needed, as I had developed that program for my customer in Excel. The solution grew and expanded over the years, and took on some serious basic programming, but it was a solution that worked. I left application development in 2006, but there is still one company using that Access solution that I built in 1995 as I write this in November 2022.

At its height, this particular program was installed at eight different companies of the nine in Israel that operated in their field at the time. One customer was based in Tel Aviv, in the northern part of the city in an apartment complex that had been converted to office space. Since I was offering a full package by networking the computers in the office and installing my program, I needed to do the work at night, after the employees had gone home. There was much crawling under desks and sometimes resting down there on the carpet when it got late. For these offices of seven to fifteen computers, it was an all-night project.

Such it was on that night in Tel Aviv. I finished the work a little before sunrise and left the office to stretch my legs. The door of the office directly across the hall was open. It had a small torn piece of cardboard taped on it with a few letters in English scratched on it with a ball-point pen, presumably the name of the company. I knocked on the door, simply curious as to the name. In the reception area a young man was sleeping in a chair. I heard talking from the back and called out. Two more young men came out of a back room. They stood looking at me and I realized that they were not expecting visitors at that time.

What is “ICQ,” I asked with a smile.

“Say the letters again, slowly” one of them replied.

I was good with word games, and I knew immediately what we were talking about and I surprised them when I said:

“Don’t tell me you have a messaging program.”

How did I know this? Just knowing that ICQ was a play on “I seek you” would not have led anybody to leap to an understanding about what they were working on. In truth, it was with a heavy heart that I knew, because my brother-in-law and I had been working on this same idea. In our free time, mostly as a theoretical exercise but quite aware of the potential value of such a project. I could see by the looks on their faces that they had a product. Where my brother-in-law Reuven and I had been theorizing over tea, these boys had been pounding out code. I think that they were less surprised by my having guessed what they were working on than by the disappointment they heard in my voice and the dejected look on my face. Because they were kind-hearted and evidently had known some professional disappointment even at their early age, they invited me to look at the project. This was unexpected and I was flattered. It was a meeting of minds. Reuven had foreseen most of the bottlenecks, so I asked about them. They were impressed and happily shared their solutions. I could see that they had done it right. That meant among other things that they were not looking for help. If I could have, I would have sat there all day listening to the short two note whistle notification.

I knew what that little toot signified, and I was not surprised when less than six months later they “made an exit” and sold the product to AOL for more than four hundred million dollars.

That is, I thought I knew what it signified. I had no idea. There had never been anything like this in Israel. Four young men playing at their keyboards create their own lottery that they win in a one-time draw. True, one of the young men was the legendary Yossi Vardi’s son, and Yossi put up the funding for the server and bandwidth, and probably was a guiding force behind the project. The true significance of this event was that an entire generation of young Israelis saw—and understood—what had transpired, and then set out to duplicate it. Duplicate it they did (including our previous prime minister Naftali Bennet). Since then, there has been no looking back.

I like to think that I had a part in that story. On the surface there were some similarities right there. That one partner who was trying to sleep in the chair after a long night’s work breathing in the smell of the pieces of stale pizza spread around him reminded me of myself trying to sleep on the moldy carpet next door spitting out the occasional dust ball from my mouth. We were so much alike! But no, we were not alike, and I understood then that it takes a true visionary to know that there is a world of difference between a moldy piece of pizza and a moldy carpet. My part? I like to imagine that I happened upon them at a critical junction, that they had some sort of last-minute crisis of confidence, and this strange old apparition that appeared in their office at five in the morning with his middle-aged enthusiasm helped them get back on track. In my mind’s eye I see us back then in the rough ocean of life, they in their sleek clipper ship struggling to spread their sails and come into the wind, while I am far below, alone in my dinghy soaking wet because I forgot my raincoat yelling up to them with all my strength: “stay the course boys, stay the course!”